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"I am the very last President not to really have to worry about YouTube" while campaigning for the White House, President Bush told RealClearPolitics in an exclusive Oval Office interview last week, discussing the role the Internet and new media played in the November 4th elections.

"The 'gotcha' moments in my campaign in the past were few and far between," the President recalled, noting that with the advent of YouTube candidates have to be "really careful" what they say or "you're liable to see yourself on the Internet, along with 20 million other people."

As Benen suggests, perhaps Bush should have worried a bit more about YouTube, but leave that aside for the moment. The idea that a growing bottom-up panopticon will have important—and not exclusively salutary—effects on our political life is a drum I've been banging here for a bit, but I finally decided it might behoove me to skim back through the work of the guy who popularized the term "panopticon," Michel Foucault. Depending on the state of intellectual fashion during your undergrad years, you may recall that Foucault borrowed Jeremy Bentham's idea of a "panopticon prison" where control was exerted more through surveillance than direct application of force. What most people recall about this, if anything, was Foucault's idea that the act of observation—and indeed, the mere awareness that one might be observed at any given time—exerted a powerful psychological effect on the observed. The original French title of Foucault's most famous work, Discipline and Punish, is actually Surveiller et Punir, and the rendering of surveiller (cognate with "to surveil") as "discipline" is a pretty good summation of that central idea.

What's sometimes forgotten, though, is that Foucault was also concerned with rejecting the strictly hierarchical model of power implicit in the "panopticon," where "power" is a property of one group (the guards) imposing its will on a subordinate group. Instead, he argued, we should pay attention to the forms of power that inhabit the interstices of social relations. Here's a relevant passage from his History of Sexuality:

[There] is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a society (and makes it function); the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one another, attracting and propagating one another, but finding their base of support and their conditions elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the gret anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose “inventors” or decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy.

As usual with Foucault, this is a good deal more obscure than it needs to be, but the gist of it is that control can take the form of what economist Friedrich Hayek called a "spontaneous order"—a system that emerges from human actions without being the product of any conscious human design.

The obvious takeaway from Bush's remarks is that a YouTubed world will make politicians increasingly cautious and guarded, which is hardly a novel or profound observation. The more interesting question, to my mind, is how we might characterize the implicit "aims and objectives" of a distributed Little Brother panopticon. Not all videos, as a million frustrated marketers will tell you, are equally viral. Some slips captured on video will outrage a particular online interest group—evangelicals or feminists or gun enthusiasts or environmentalists—and bounce around the echo chamber a bit before dying out. Others (think George Allen's "macaca moment" or Trent Lott's unfortunate encomium to Strom Thurmond) break to the mainstream and become major liabilities.

Now, obviously, that's partly because some slips and gotchas are just intrinsically more broadly offensive than others. But it may also be the case that the structure of online communications, the shape of the social graph at any given time, makes some gotchas more likely to "tip" than others as a function of the pattern of connections between these various groups. It seems worth investigating whether we're really just inculcating a generalized caution in public figures, or whether the panopticon tends to "discipline" politicians in more specific ways. If the latter, we can also ask how that discipline is likely to shift with changes in the online social graph.